On March 8th, Zencoder, Aspera, Amazon Web Services and Netflix gathered in New York City to discuss cloud-based media workflow. Zencoder is built on AWS, and in November we announced a partnership with Aspera to improve file transfer speeds to the cloud. The event was the first opportunity that we've had to demonstrate the fruits of our "collaborative innovation".
With scalable storage and processing, the cloud is the right place to do transcoding. However, these advantages are attenuated by sluggish transfer speeds over the open Internet.
In his talk, Zencoder co-founder Jon Dahl presented four strategies for eliminating the bandwidth bottlenecks that crop up when using the cloud for transcoding. Moreover, he demonstrates that combining accelerated file transfer and parallel processing in the cloud results in a transcoding workflow that is up to 10x faster, and makes more efficient use of bandwidth, than on-premise solutions.
We've distilled the talk down to the article below, which is also available for download here. Major content providers like Netflix use these techniques to optimize their cloud-based transcoding workflows. While Netflix is a pioneering (perhaps the pioneering) user of the cloud, these techniques will be useful to any organization with large video files.
Rethinking Large Video Files in the Cloud: Strategies for Eliminating Bandwidth Bottlenecks
